This ArcGIS map shows how the Carleton Football team’s opponents have grown over time. The data goes from the 1924 season to present. The map adds 5 years of data at every interval. At any given interval, the points on the map represent locations of all the schools that the football team has played up until that point.
This map uses the data we got from the Sports Information Office which was a list of every game the Carleton football team has played since the late 1800’s. We used R and RStudio to clean and filter the data for this map. We filtered out any data from before the 1924 season and added coordinate data for each school using the Geocode by Awesome Tables Google Sheets extension and Google Maps. We also standardized all of the college names and calculated the number of times Carleton has played each individual school. For more information about our data cleaning process, you can check out our Final Project Update post.
To visualize our data, we used ArcGIS with time enabled on our feature layer. This allows the map to change over time so we can display the time dimension of our data. This data visualization is exploratory. Since the map adds points as time goes on, we can see how the team’s opponents have changed over the years. It is interesting because while the data is concentrated in the Midwest, there are a few opponents that are based farther from Carleton (for example, Pomona-Pitzer in the 2023 season, Colorado College in the 2003 season, West Point in the 1928 and 1932 seasons, and Trinity University in the 1983 season).
To style the visualization and increase its clarity, we made the points on the map a dark blue so they would stick out against the basemap. We also chose a minimalistic basemap so that it would not distract from our data. Our time slider can advance by itself but also allows viewers to interact with the data themselves and move the bar around at their own speed. Additionally, each point can be clicked and pulls up a popup showing the school’s name, the number of times Carleton has played them (count), the first and last dates Carleton has played them, and their location data. By having that information in a popup, the visuals of the map can stay minimalistic while still carrying a lot of information.
